Lo que los ingleses dicen de Mauricio Funes

Gira de Mauricio Funes por el Viejo Mundo

Mauricio Funes, el hombre que habló por las pantallas de televisión durante más de 20 años a los salvadoreños, ahora convertido en candidato a presidente por el partido FMLN (Farabudo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), se perfila como el “político revelación” que traspasa fronteras en su campaña electoral y que además encabeza por, primera vez en la historia, todas las encuestas –las serias– de nuestro país.

El FRENTE ya sueña con la banda tricolor cruzándole el pecho a su candidato.

Las giras fuera de El Salvador, a EE.UU., a Brasil, España, Bélgica, Alemania, etc. ya son habituales, incluso Mauricio Funes se permite un lenguaje de casi Jefe de Estado cuando visita a personalidades institucionales de otros países.

“Con ellos analizamos el estado actual de las negociaciones del Acuerdo de Asociación entre la Unión Europea y Centroamérica y revisamos los montos de la cooperación para nuestro país” dijo Funes a algunos funcionarios de la Comisión Europea, el brazo ejecutivo de la Unión Europea, durante su gira esta semana por el Viejo Mundo.

En el coloso europeo, Funes fue recibido por el propio Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de Angela Merkel y Vicepresidente de Alemania, Frank-Walter Steinmeier –todo un detalle de parte de un gobierno conservador– a quien le pedio “fondos para el desarrollo y la cooperación” de su pueblo.

Funes parece un llanero solitario montado en un caballo, bien herrado, con una espada filuda por delante y un bulto de contrapeso “a lanca” –el de Sánchez Cerén– dispuesto a dejarse la piel para lograr convertirse en el próximo presidente de nuestra pequeña, problemática y querida nación salvadoreña.

El hombre ha aparecido en uno de los periódicos más grandes del Reino Unido, The Guardian, en donde a él lo ponen como el “político fenómeno que busca el cambio” y a los líderes al interior del partido como “quemados cuyas estructuras todavía llevan fotos del Che Guevara y banderas soviéticas en los mítines”.

Les dejamos con el artículo en inglés.

©Salvadoreños en el Mundo

Salvadoran presidential candidate walks line between right and left
McClatchy Newspapers
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday May 09, 2008
Article history

At a raucous rally in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the banner hanging behind journalist-turned-presidential candidate Mauricio Funes explained the heart of his campaign: Cambio. Change.

Employing a buzzword from this year's US election, the leftwing Funes has become a political phenomenon by promising a new direction for one of the staunchest American allies in the region, a country that adopted the dollar as its currency and is the only Latin American nation to still have troops in Iraq.

The former television host has tried to deftly manage a growing challenge in the politically polarised region - vowing to remain friendly with both the US and leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez while implementing the same formula of government-funded social programs backed by Chavez and his leftist allies.

But an equally daunting challenge for Funes, arguably El Salvador's most respected journalist, is his effort to shake up his own party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The party began as a 1980s guerrilla movement and evolved into the country's second-strongest political force but has failed to win the presidency with more traditional leftist candidates.

Funes wants to remake the FMLN into a pragmatic party that, if victorious, would join El Salvador with Guatemala and Nicaragua as former Cold War-era battlegrounds where voters are trying leftist leaders for the first time since their conflicts ended.

Not that those ideological battles are over. With 10 months to go before the March vote, conservative critics have painted Funes as a Trojan horse, a moderate face for a party whose leaders still wear fatigues and whose supporters brandish pictures of Che Guevara and Soviet flags at campaign rallies.

"The main challenge we face is convincing the public, especially the undecided, that my presence isn't just a formality, that I haven't merely arrived to apply varnish on the image of the FMLN," Funes said in an interview at his campaign office. "We must convince the public that the party has moderated."

Funes won fame as a crusading journalist who took on the government and other institutions on his television show. He won respect for his persistent style of questioning and even became a sex symbol in some quarters.

When Funes was fired in 2005, many viewers were outraged for what they saw as political reprisal. His television station's new owners, however, said they simply wanted a change in programming.

But as Funes' stock was soaring, fortunes were fading for the FMLN. The group waged a military campaign against a US-backed, rightwing government in the 1980s, and both sides were implicated in human-rights abuses.

After peace accords in 1992, the FMLN evolved into a political party and has had success at the ballot box but never a presidential victory.

After two decades of El Salvador letting the free market run its course, Funes is promising greater government social spending to help many citizens left out of prosperity.

Funes has tried to make symbolic and substantive breaks from the FMLN. At rallies, he doesn't sing the party's anthem or wear the traditional red colours, preferring to campaign in a crisp white guayabera shirt.

He backs the party's call to pull Salvadoran troops from Iraq but does not agree with its traditional stance that El Salvador should end the use of the dollar and return to its previous currency, the colon.

Funes said "dollarisation" and the adoption of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2006 have had negative effects, such as inflation and unfavourable competition for small-scale farmers, but that it is too late to scrap those policies.

Dagoberto Gutierrez, a liberal political analyst at Salvadoran Lutheran University, said Funes should try to maintain the perception that he can be independent of party orthodoxy.

"One of his strengths is that he didn't develop through links to the party," Gutierrez said. "His main links need to remain with the people."

The campaign still is in its early days, but newspaper polls published last month showed Funes with an advantage of 7 to 9 percentage points over rival Rodrigo Avila of the ruling rightwing Arena party. And Funes already is drawing huge crowds.

Oscar Ortiz, mayor of Santa Tecla and a member of Funes' party, said he is confident that Funes' personal traits will overcome any concerns about his ideology.

"We have watched him develop for 20 years, acting with honesty and with courage," he said.

But Funes said he is facing doubts that he is a moderate outsider, especially after the selection of Salvador Sanchez Ceren, the party's veteran secretary general, as his running mate.

President Antonio Saca, whose term ends next year, has questioned the FMLN's supposed moderation. "If it flies like a duck, swims like a duck and eats like a duck, it's a duck. The FMLN is a communist party. Its ideas haven't changed," he told local reporters.

The election is already drawing international scrutiny, especially after neighbouring Nicaragua returned its former Marxist leader, Daniel Ortega, to power last year.

While keeping open channels with the US, Ortega has moved firmly into Venezuela's political and ideological orbit.

In February, US Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell warned Congress that he expects Chavez to provide "generous campaign funding" to Funes. But Funes denied any links, and Chavez called Saca to pledge not to interfere in the elections.

Funes said he would be friendly with Venezuela, especially if cheap oil is offered, but that his priority is a cordial relationship with the US, especially because El Salvador receives nearly $4bn annually in remittances from its citizens there.

To reassure Washington, Funes met with state department officials and members of Congress recently to insist that he is no radical.

So far, he says, he doesn't regret leaving the airwaves for the rough-and-tumble campaign trail.

"Up until now, I haven't been the hunter being hunted," he said. "But if I myself say that public figures need to be scrutinized, how can I reject that same scrutiny?"

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